Stonehewn
by Xelias
Summary: What are you afraid of, soldier? What do you fear? // margulis x cherenkov. slash. mature audiences, please.


**A/N: **My first time writing either of them, but it needed to happen. Seriously. If you like, please do let me know. It would put a smile on my face. :3

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**Stonehewn**

"What are you afraid of, soldier?" he demands to know. "What do you fear?"

"I fear nothing."

It's a husky sound, threaded by doubt, the U-TIC uniform all over him and trying as uniforms will to color him homogeneous, only to concede defeat repeatedly: it creates a façade that might just have managed to conceal the truth, if he'd had his helmet on. But it rests under his arm instead like a ball without a chain, so Margulis sees past the armor, past even the tone, and cuts.

"That's a damn lie."

The words have no heat, only knowledge. He tests Cherenkov like a teacher to a pupil, patient, searching out embers of potential left clinging. Andrew Cherenkov is a split seed in his hands, feeble, damaged tendril snaking up and then drooping under the burden of its own stature. Left uncultivated, he remains nothing more than a waste of exceptional life.

Cherenkov cannot resign to his assigned role. The notion is intolerable.

"It isn't!" he insists, and Margulis feels vindicated at the towering wrath that flickers up from around the edges of Cherenkov's wounded confidence.

"Nonsense, Cherenkov. Every living thing in this universe fears something." He sounds almost conversational. "If you can't hold your ground, it'll destroy you. And then what do you have left to your name but a legacy of cowardice and failure?"

Margulis doesn't even bother to break him down on the bridge anymore. Cherenkov's programming is best cracked in his quarters.

For convenience's sake.

"I," Cherenkov begins through a tensing jaw, "don't have the means to a legacy. Sir."

Margulis considers this briefly and then tears away Cherenkov's chest plate before Cherenkov even knows it's been unbuckled. He turns his back to him then, reflective, constructing his device, and peers out into the star-shot black.

"So that's what you believe."

Cherenkov's silence is suspicious, appraising.

"And you're completely right. This is your damnation, Cherenkov. You are invalid, fated to exit this life a wasted existence, bereft of object or meaning. Bereft of value. Now tell me, soldier: is that what you want?"

"_No!_ Sir."

Cherenkov is cracking.

"The first rule of victory is to deny defeat. For you, as yet but a desolate husk abandoned to your own futility," Margulis treads a circle around him. "Defeat. Is. Your. Mainstay. In the absence of purpose you have no choice but to make that purpose for yourself, to prove your necessity. Prove, or be shunned by this world—and discarded as worthless." He stops just in front of him and beckons him forward.

"Prove it!"

So eagerly Cherenkov lunges, pressurized rage a vapor barreling off his body, and at this time, in this place, Margulis doesn't move. Instead he twists and throws Cherenkov into the wall and is on him that same second, gloved hand splayed against his forehead and holding him there. Cherenkov dips out of his hold and pushes off the wall and they collide again, and as Margulis deftly grabs him for another throw he shifts his weight and delivers a vicious roundhouse to Margulis's cheek.

Margulis lets out an exultant roar and strikes Cherenkov with such speed and might and abundance that something that isn't blood rises from his gut and splatters itself onto the cold floor. But he recovers so easily, just as he was built to, and whips around the commander's body like a pole while seeking the purchase necessary to break his neck.

Just when all seems right, Margulis takes him by the wrists and keeps him that way, leaving his body craned awkwardly against his back. This is no particular hindrance to his assault.

"Stand down." This is.

And he relaxes, though still locked with his commander in a parody of an embrace. Margulis reaches over with each full hand and pulls off Cherenkov's gloves, slow, then grips higher on his arms and hefts him ruthlessly over his head and into the wall again. Cherenkov lands on his feet but is pinioned by solid heat behind him to a sheet of metal alloy, and Margulis's breath in his hair and the roll of hips against his ass signal that the first phase of this meeting has passed.

"You're magnificent," comes the rough praise, ticklish in his ear. Margulis draws back some then, to allow him to turn around. When he does, he finds that Margulis has at some point divested himself of his sword and own gloves, and for his next conquest has chosen Cherenkov's fly.

Only Margulis could make kneeling look so powerful. He tugs all fabric to the tops of his thighs and devours him in one smooth motion, him, Cherenkov, ever the soldier already at attention. At a puff of warm air around the base of his cock, a little of the fight in him dies, seeping out of him with a muted, appreciative groan. Margulis does not worship before him: he teaches.

No sooner than his head tilts back does Margulis pull away with a wet sound, and a sudden bubble of fury bursts in his chest and twitches his hips forward in pursuit of lost sensation. Margulis's gaze is burning out his eyes.

"Day in and day out, Cherenkov, you lead what you deign to call your life vacantly, only waiting for sustenance to arrive at your feet." His tone turns lofty, smiling a thin smile full of spite. "I can't even suck your dick before I find you enslaved by misty-eyed nostalgia for your own helplessness."

"That's not true," says Cherenkov with more force than he intended, hands closing at his side and in Margulis's hair. He challenges him to prove it and Cherenkov yanks his face into his crotch in reply, compelled by something at his core that wants nothing more than to shut him up with blows and teeth in flesh.

"That's right," Margulis rumbles lowly, lips against his balls. "It's as easy as taking."

So take he does, cock brushing along the commander's proud bruised cheekbone and then pressed to disobedient lips, seizing him tightly by the jaw to coerce him open. There is a victorious slant to Margulis's brow as he takes Cherenkov halfway, then bites lightly into the shaft to elicit the favored response: he pulls Margulis rudely forward, sliding in with a grimace.

The blood fizzes in his veins as he fucks the throat holding him long and deep and reckless. Margulis receives him flawlessly with muscles at rest and ease of breath, unfazed by Cherenkov's ferocity, his violence. Cherenkov plunges and withdraws quickly across tongue and teeth and doesn't care, white-knuckling fistfuls of his commander's hair and snarling as he doubles over Margulis and bucks once (slipping), twice (slickly), and finally stills (sticky).

Margulis stands and fixes Cherenkov with a level, peculiar stare, and spits his load back into his face.

Cherenkov's hot hands make to crush around Margulis's neck and the next thing he knows he's on the floor. He lies there momentarily stunned, pulse pounding, breath audible and ragged, face wet and lips salty with his own semen. Margulis straddles Cherenkov's half-bare hips—pretense come translucent, only partially undone—and pinning his wrists overhead, kisses him hard.

"I enjoyed that," he drawls, triumphant, and the look on Margulis's face, nothing short of predatory, desire at last laid bare before them both, causes Cherenkov's hands to twitch under their restraints.

A smooth tongue slides over the corner of his mouth, relieving him in part of the cooling slimy mess there. The force with which Margulis jerks repeatedly against him punches breathy punctuations out of his lungs and he cranes up to suck air from Margulis's mouth instead, arms straining, fighting. Fighting.

Cherenkov shoves him off with a knee wedged between their bodies and can't attack him fast enough, thirsty for skin and blood to the tune of snapped laces and the clatter of buckles. He takes the commander by the swell in his trousers, shifting hard, and is swiftly heaved onto the bed above.

Margulis sinks his teeth into one bared asscheek. Margulis slides up and looms over him then, fingers cool and wet and also audibly stroking himself with that slippery soft crackle sound, somehow. Margulis is mysterious. Margulis too often acts without ever being seen. And then Margulis takes an oily handful of U-TIC uniform and hisses approval against Cherenkov's back, and Cherenkov groans loudly enough over the rhythmic beat of their bodies that he can hear it reverberate off the walls. He splits a sheet as Margulis _fucks_ him with punishing rigor and huffs out a grunt, exquisite, this, brutal, and when Margulis comes it's with near silence and a hot bite into his clothed shoulder.

They rest there a moment, catching breath, Margulis's touch tempered to something almost affectionate as he pulls away and out of sight.

"So after that pleasant interlude, I ask you again: what is it that you fear?"

"I fear nothing," says Cherenkov, level, through aching bones and bruised organs, rising to face the disheveled room flecked with various bodily fluids. It reeks of humanity in here; reveling in that fact, he follows Margulis to the shower.

Margulis, mildly: "Good."

_fin_


End file.
